Commercial and military aircraft are provided with a variety of cockpit instrumentation. This instrumentation includes navigation equipment, radios, gauges, flight computers and CRT displays suited to control the aircraft and provide situational awareness of the aircraft to the pilot during flight. One type of display data is vertical aircraft position relative to barometric altitude or a vertical flight path relative to a ground reference point (runway threshold) or predefined waypoint. Conventional flight displays typically provide pilots with representations of old technology mechanical indicators such as pointers on a dial or scale or a moving tape display. There is a desire to improve aircraft situational awareness through the use of intuitive altitude and vertical path error displays. The improved situational awareness is important for both manual control flight, and also for autopilot coupled flight. By providing the pilot improved situational awareness, the ability to monitor the flight controls and respond to a problem is much better, and consequently, the operational safety of the aircraft can be improved.